Israeli intelligence operatives spied on the alleged 9/11 hijackers for months prior to the attacks.

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly ­- and seemingly inexplicably -­ attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military -­ training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according to the DEA report.http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/080307Israel.htm

Our take....

The common suggestion here is that some (or perhaps all) of these art students may have been Mossad agents, who tracked the hijackers around the US. But if this were the case, then wouldn’t you expect the “students” to try and avoid the attention of local authorities? The reality was very different, as the DEA report quoted above states:

In January, 2001, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Office of Security Programs (IS), began to receive reports of Israeli art students attempting to penetrate several DEA Field Offices in the continental United States. Additionally, there have been reports of Israeli art students visiting the homes of numerous DEA employees. These incidents have occurred since at least the beginning of 2000, and have continued to the present. The number of reported incidents increased in November/December 2000, and has continued to date. These incidents have involved several other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies, with contacts made at other agencies' facilities and the residences of their employees. Geographically, these incidents are very widespread, ranging from California to Florida. The majority of the incidents have occurred in the southern half of the continental U.S. with the most activity reported in the state of Florida. Since April 2001, the number of reported incidents has declined, however, the geographic spread of the incidents has increased to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles.

The activities of these Israeli art students raised the suspicion of IS and other field offices when attempts were made to circumvent the access control systems at DEA offices, and when these individuals began to solicit their paintings at the homes of DEA employees. The nature of the individuals' conduct, combined with intelligence information and historical information regarding past incidents involving Israeli Organized Crime, leads IS to believe the incidents may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity. It is believed by IS that these incidents should not be the basis for any immediate concern for the safety and security of DEA personnel, however, employees should continue to exercise due caution in safeguarding information relating to DEA investigations, or activities.

DEA Orlando has developed the first drug nexus to this group. Telephone numbers obtained from an Israel Art Student encountered at the Orlando D.O. have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA (Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California, Texas, and New York. The Orlando D.O. has opened an investigation that is being coordinated with DEA HQs.

In general, these individuals appear to be organized in teams of 8 to 10 people, with one person described as the "Team Leader". They are usually encountered in pairs or individually carrying a makeshift art portfolio. Several times, they have, been seen or admitted to being dropped off in an area by the Team Leader, who returns later to pick them up. The females are usually described as very attractive, and all are generally in their early to mid-20s. Most admit to having served in the Israeli Military. This is not surprising given the mandatory military service require in Israel, however, a majority of those questioned has stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordinance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot missile unit. That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background.

Their stories are remarkable only in their consistency. At first, they will state that they are art students, either from the University of Jerusalem, or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Other times they will purport to be promoting a new art studio in the area. When pressed for details as to the location of the art studio or why they are selling the paintings, they become evasive. Some claim to be the artist who painted the artwork, others claim they promoting the work of others or of Israel. Information has been received which indicates the art is actually produced in China. When told that they cannot solicit on federal facilities, they will claim that the paintings are not for sale, but that they are soliciting interest in the paintings, either for an art studio or for a future art sale.

An incident report by DEA Tampa has revealed much information relating to these individuals. DEA Agents at the Tampa District Office questioned the Team Leader of a group of 9 individuals at length, The Team Leader stated he purchases the paintings for $8 to $10 dollars from an individual in the Hollywood/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida area. The paintings are then sold for $50 to $80 dollars. (Other offices have reported the paintings selling for $150-$200 dollars.) The individuals come to the U. S. on tourist visas, and finance their stay here by selling the paintings. The Hollywood, Florida area seems to be a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area.

There have been incidents where criminal and/or suspicious activity has been associated with these individuals. Two were arrested by FPS in Plantation, FL with counterfeit Social Security Cards. Baton Rouge, LA discovered a small amount (personal use amount) of marijuana in the residence of one group, and some of the individuals interviewed by DEA/Tampa admitted to smoking marijuana. Criminal records checks have revealed some arrest history on persons associated with these groups. Passport irregularities have been reported. A review of their passports shows travel to several other countries, to include Thailand, Laos, India, Kenya, Central and South America, Australia, Germany, Amsterdam, and Canada. One individual presented a Canadian citizenship card along with his Israeli passport. A report from EPA/Denver involved a female art student going to the house of an EPA Special Agent to sell art, and returning later to photograph the house. There is a report of one of these individuals being seen diagramming the layout of a federal facility. This information has not been directly reported to DEA, and has not been confirmed by first-hand observation.

When encountered at residences, some of these individuals are persistent in trying to get inside the home. Some have asked to use the telephone when leaving. Some employees have reported that they came only to their house, while others have reported that the students approached the entire neighborhood. http://cryptome.org/dea-il-spy.htm

Carrying drugs. Passport irregularities. Pestering DEA agents. Perhaps “diagramming the layout of a federal facility”. How does any of this relate to an attempt to monitor Al Qaeda agents? It makes little sense to us.

Still, let’s excuse that. Perhaps only some of the students were Mossad agents. Maybe they were performing several missions, which of course would make them even more important in intelligence terms: that would make sense.

Except there’s a problem with that idea, too. If this really were a major Israeli spying ring, then why would a former Israeli intelligence agent draw US attention to it? (Our emphasis):

125. On December 12, 2000, Shay ASHKENAZI, male, Israeli, DOB: 11-12-74, Israeli Passport number 6847902, arrived at the SEA TAC International Airport via Northwest Airlines flight 33 from Tel Aviv, Israel. He was referred for secondary inspection by the I&NS Inspectors. As reported by I&NS Intelligence officer Omar N. Nuri, ASHKENAZI stated he was a former Israeli intelligence officer, and was now traveling to "enjoy life". He claimed to have been in the U.S. in April 2000, when he was involved in a car accident in South Carolina. The purpose of this trip was to finalize the case with his attorney and to receive medical treatment. ASHKEHAZI volunteered information that a fraud scheme involving Israeli nationals was taking place in the U.S. He stated that young male and female Israelis are being recruited in Israel to enter the U.S. with B-1/B-2 tourist visas and be employed as door-to-door salesmen of paintings that are shipped to the U.S. from Israel. He claimed that one of the individuals involved in this is "Mikaeel" (sic) and is present in Texas operating this business. (See above paragraphs regarding Michael CALMANOVIC). He stated the Israelis usually operate in Texas, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, Washington, and possibly other states. ASHKEHAZI stated another person involved in this is "GERUD" (LNU), residing at 27461-150th Avenue SE, Kent, WA 98402 with telephone 253-638-8143. ASHKEHAZI was admitted into the U.S. following the inspection. http://cryptome.org/dea-il-spy.htm

We don’t just have the word of one man that such a scheme existed, either. A similar pattern of “art students” selling art for “wildly inflated” prices appeared in Canada, apparently starting in 2002, eventually resulting in arrests a couple of years later. But for “working illegally”, not espionage:

While officials in the United States are busy grappling with the question of whether Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed sensitive information to Israel and compromised national security, authorities in our neighbor to the north are trying to tamp down speculation that a platoon of goateed and dreadlocked Israeli art students who infiltrated Canada may have been working as spies...

The students and their handlers, Guy Grinberg and Jackie Yakov Senior, were charged earlier this month under Canadian law with working in the country illegally, and faced no other charges, said Robert Ferguson, director of immigration enforcement for the Canada Border Services Agency in Canada. A similar operation gained widespread media attention amid allegations of espionage when it surfaced in the United States in 2000.

In the most recent case, government authorities in Canada have insisted that all the evidence collected indicates the young, self-described “art students” — all of them Israelis in the country on visitor’s visas — were involved in something far more prosaic than espionage: the importation of tragically bad, dirt-cheap paintings from the Far East that were then sold at wildly inflated prices door-to-door in some of the more upscale neighborhoods in western Canada. In some cases, the paintings sold for more than 100 times their value, prompting authorities in Calgary to issue a warning to the public to be wary of art fraud, said Detective Frank Cattoni of the Calgary Police Department. The alert made no mention of espionage.

Had Mossad simply recycled the same cover story that they’d used in the US, even though it had received so much attention? That would seem to be unwise. Perhaps the story could be reworked, accepting that some of the Israeli art students in the US were involved in an art fraud, but there were Mossad agents along as well, using them as cover...? It doesn’t seem like the best cover, to involve yourself with a group that could draw so much attention, however if we want to keep this story going then it’s the best explanation available.

And of course there’s also the ever-popular “too many coincidences” argument, which in this case points to the locations of the “art students”, and how closely they were located to the 9/11 hijackers:

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue apartment.

In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda­connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000­01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student" activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]". It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/080307Israel.htm

However, exactly how “improbable” these coincidences might be isn’t entirely clear.

The first problem is that the DEA report details many locations where the Israeli students lived, travelled to or had attempted to sell art. All these, in fact:

(“Possible” indicates the claim is based on statements from a suspect and may not necessarily be true. If you’re interested in particular locations then please, go read the original report.)

This isn’t surprising, as the DEA lists 125 potential suspects who had been travelling all over the country. So surely, if you correlate these addresses with 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers, and other potential suspects, who were also moving around the country, you’d expect the occasional overlap.

As an example, the above quote makes much of one such overlap:

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect.

And even if you believe that’s still “too much of a coincidence”, there’s another issue here that’s being carefully avoided. Consider this quote from earlier:

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue apartment.http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/080307Israel.htm

The DEA report (paragraph 76 onwards) explains how Serfaty was picked up and questioned by DEA agents on March 1st, 2001, at which point they discovered that he had these Hollywood addresses. And these are as documented above, but the problem is that Atta wouldn’t move into Jackson Street for another two months.

The Miami HeraldSeptember 13, 2001 Thursday FINAL EDITION

HEADLINE: INVESTIGATIONS IN FLORIDA

...Agents searched a house at 1818 Jackson St., hauling away several bags of material. Mohamed Atta had apparently lived in an upstairs unit in May and June. Authorities also visited a Mail Boxes Etc. on Sheridan Street. A fellow student pilot who roomed with Atta in Venice listed that address on his pilot's license...

Clearly Serfaty wasn’t following Atta, then. What’s more, no evidence has been presented to show that Serfaty was still renting these apartments by the time Atta arrived. Another section in the DEA report showed one group of Israelis didn’t react well to being arrested, leaving their addresses in a hurry:

49. Based on investigative leads developed by I&NS S/A R. Marra and R. Martini, the Rochelle Plaza Apartments, located at 312 Rochelle Road, and the Hidden Ridge Apartments, located at 1103 FEdden Ridge, both in Irving, Texas, were identified as possible residences used by CALMANOVIC. On April 14, 2001, I&NS and FPS S/As interviewed Ms. Mary Stanton, Property Manager for the Rochelle Apartments. Ms. Stanton stated that CALMANOVIC had rented five (5) apartments in the complex, and that these apartments were occupied by 25 Israelis. Ms. Stanton stated that all of the Israelis left suddenly and vacated the apartments on the week of March 26/27th, (the time of the arrests of the 13 other Israelis). Ms. Stanton stated she believed CALMANOVIC was still in the Dallas area, as he had recently called regarding his security deposits. Copies of the lease agreements and copies of Israeli passports were provided by Ms. Stanton. http://cryptome.org/dea-il-spy.htm

In any event, there are similar problems with claims relating to the other alleged hijackers. While several lived in Hollywood, for instance, we believe they all arrived after Serfaty’s March 1st arrest, showing that he wasn’t following them. To be fair, the complete timelines are murky, relying on newspaper reports of variable quality so there’s plenty of scope for error, but keep that point in mind anyway. And don’t be impressed by apparent coincidences about where art students and alleged hijackers lived, until the issue of when has also been addressed to your satisfaction.